Thursday, 30 October 2014

New Skips

Skips are what makes the little railway at Nystrup Gravel earn its living. After having ordered a batch in the beginning of the year, the railway has now taken delivery of 9 new skips - one of them with brakes. The skips are built from the Hesketh and Snoodyk 1:35 scale etched brass kit launched last year and produced from drawings of a German Dolberg skip.

Yesterday I received a package from Australia with the skips. I was excited as I had not only bought kits of skips. Rather than build them myself I had ordered them in built condition. It is the first time I have paid someone to assemble kits for me and it will most likely not be a thing that will happen often. I love modelling myself, so why pay someone else for the fun? But the bending and soldering of nine skips occured to me as something I might find both somewhat difficult and perhaps a little boring. Consider me spoiled if you like.

I ordered my skips unpainted but they arrived chemically blackened to avoid oxidation. While they don't look too bad unpainted I will eventually paint my skips later.

I have yet to examine the skips in more detail and test run them on my modules, but from my intial handling of them and pushing them over a test track everything seems to be in perfect order. On some of them I may adjust the fit of the skip bucket in its cradle just a little. Otherwise I can't think of what I could add to these skips except paint, weathering and a tiny drop of oil in the bearings.

The skip with bucket tipped.

Bucket pulled off the skip frame. Even on my hurried snapshots the fine detail can be seen.

I have previously sought different ways to make up realistic trains of skips. I bought my first skip kits in 1999 from Scale Link and added minor details myself to change them a bit. I continued buying Scale Link skips as they were what was available and looked most like the skips most used on Danish industrial railways. In addition to the Scale Link skips I acquired six Hudson skips from Slaters Plastikard. Quite satisfied with both the look and running of the Slaters skips, the type was however, never in widespread use in Denmark. Consequently I couldn't bring myself to buy more of them. Mark Hesketh and Bernard Snoodyk have now provided exactly the skips I wanted and I'm seriously contemplating if I should order more.

I will now have to consult the Nystrup Gravel archive for that missing half page of their inventory of skips. When numbering my new skips I would like them to carry correct numbers according to Nystrup Gravel practice. I have the top half of the document but I suspect the company's Dolberg type skips to be listed on the lower half of the document...

No comments:

Post a Comment

About Nystrup Gravel

Nystrup Gravel is a 1:35 scale model of a Danish gravel company with a 600 mm. railway to carry gravel. Lines from several gravel pits converged outside the small town of Nystrup before reaching the company’s sorting facility and loading ramp for lorries.﻿﻿﻿

I model the company’s railway as it looked in the early fifties. I try to make up a believable setting for my railway models by researching the history of the company and its environments. This blog gives you the possibility to follow my work. Notice that Nystrup Gravel is ficton and that all history regarding the railway and company is my work and not real.